What this book describes is a kind of perceptual power, a feeling beyond sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. If this "sixth sense" is in science fiction movies, it will be called "superpower" .Nicolas Cage in the movie "Foreseeing the Future" has such a talent. He stepped into a cafe one afternoon and sat in front of the large floor-to-ceiling windows, because he knew that his future lover would appear at that time ...and if in the real world, he might be called a "prophet".The medieval French doctor Nocha Damas described the future world he envisioned in long and difficult poems. We still can’t imagine why he knew that the prosperous human beings would usher in a world that was almost destructive for the first time The Great War and the Second World War... However, in this book, this feeling appears to ordinary people. They have come to the world and achieved success with incredible perseverance. They are the best in the modern business world.More often, this "sixth sense" is called "faith", which can often be touched and perceived after the "event" has passed, but at certain moments it only belongs to a small part of us people.Therefore, this book explores the "belief" of a group of people at certain moments, and this power plays an important role in their road to success.

Today, this "moment" is happening again.The Austrian biographer Stefan Zweig writes in the opening pages of "When Man's Stars Shine": "Long years must pass needlessly before a truly historic moment - a human star-studded moment." And go, at this critical moment, those things that usually happen slowly in sequence and juxtaposition, are compressed into such a short moment that decides everything. This moment makes an irreversible decision for generations, it determines It affects the life and death of a person, the survival of a nation, and even the fate of the entire human race." The crisis of various enterprises seems to be such a "moment". For countless civilians, they turned into businessmen, entrepreneurs or professional managers, and reversed the fate of companies in times of crisis, which in turn affected the trajectory of the entire world.Therefore, although the "short moments" described in this book do not directly change the destiny of human beings, they all affect the world we live in in their own way.

In 1985, when the then-little-known Intel Corporation was on the brink of death, Andy Grove was in his office one day, despondently speaking with Intel's chairman and chief executive, Gordon Moore, about their plight. .Grove casually asked Moore what he would do if they both stepped down and a new president was chosen.Moore hesitated, then replied, "He's going to give up on the memory business." After that, Grove looked at Moore intently, and asked a historic question: "Then why don't you and I walk out of this door and do it ourselves?" What about?" This is a specific moment for Intel Corporation. In order to wait for this moment, Grove has been dormant in a crisis for a year. There was the mighty Intel Corporation that made microprocessors in the future.

Grove's story is just a microcosm of the book, if Mary Kay Ash had decided to heal her trauma first after the unexpected death of her first husband instead of opening the business on schedule just a month later, we'd be in the mall May never find those Mary Kay cosmetics that make women beautiful; and if Ma Yun chose to avoid risks when the "SARS" was raging, instead of launching Taobao "fighting against the wind", we will certainly not see the individual who is flourishing today. E-commerce platform; similarly, Yu Minhong almost missed the online training market, and Liu Chuanzhi may get lost in the maze of branded computers... These people stand in front of many forked intersections before making a choice, and in many cases , those abandoned paths seem more plausible.But none of them ended up doing that, and history has brought them to where they are today.What we have done in this book is hope to find out the paths they traveled and why they chose at that moment.Therefore, when reading this book, you may find some empirical value in it.

Let's share some of our observations. Today, many people already believe that no century-old company can escape the baptism of the Great Depression, and Xanadu has always been just a kind of beautiful sustenance.What is more cruel is that this is only a one-way conclusion, because even after the Great Depression, companies may still die.General Motors is a century-old American company that has experienced vicissitudes. The glory and status it once achieved is still difficult for all companies today.However, such a symbolic enterprise of American industrialization has also entered the abyss of bankruptcy under the attack of the recent financial crisis.GM is not the first tragedy, and it will never be the last. Any company may suddenly suffocate in various crises.

Compared with General Motors, the entrepreneurs recorded in this book have all appeared on the stage of history as successful, at least for now.This is exactly where history is cruel. Although the losers can sometimes give people more inspiration, history will not give them another chance, and people will always forget everything.For existing entrepreneurs, how to maintain the speed and rhythm of progress, how to deal with every crisis, and how to face future challenges, such as thinking about survival wisdom, may be more valuable. Thus, a question naturally arises: how will the crisis come?This is a question that has no standard answer, because crises are everywhere, and they often deal fatal blows to enterprises at the moment when they think it is the safest, so we can only follow the limited rules to explore and move forward.

In 1900, before the appearance of automobiles, New York, USA had to process 2.5 million pounds of horse manure and 60,000 gallons of horse urine every day. Surrounding these figures was a huge horse-related industry chain. However, the appearance of automobiles made All horse related companies are dying fast.Similarly, the appearance of paper eliminated bamboo slips, and the telephone brought telegrams and chicken feather letters into museums. Even today, because of the birth of the Internet, libraries and bazaars have entered the ranks of sunset industries.This is an easy-to-understand fact. When a new product or industry is born, huge opportunities and crises are always accompanied. Whether you are eliminated or lead the development depends on whether you are on the side of the new world.The obstinate Kodak has been sticking to the field of traditional film, but has not seen that the new digital world is getting farther and farther away from it; and when Intel is lingering in the memory industry, it is unwilling to face up to the space occupied by Japanese companies. At that time, it became a crater explorer, and it only landed safely after it entered the microprocessor industry.

However, even if you are on the right side sometimes, you can still be in danger.The most typical case is the automobile industry in the United States and Japan.In the 1950s, "Made in Japan" was synonymous with inferior products, so the first Japanese-made cars had to be withdrawn from the market when they were launched in the United States due to substandard quality.But in the 1970s, efficient and beautiful Japanese cars re-entered the U.S. market with a vengeance, after more than 70 years, starting in 1908, the United States had been the leader in the automotive industry.Subsequently, Chrysler lost $1.7 billion in 1980 and would have gone bankrupt without federal loans; followed by Ford with a loss of $1.5 billion.This can only prove once again that there is no island of safety in the business world.

At the same time, when a company is in a rising industry and is in the period of growth, how to maintain a reasonable speed is an art of tightrope walking.Some of the cases in this book point to different answers.Terry Gou of Foxconn believes in the theory of "sailing against the current". He believes that when a company is in a recession, it is actually sailing against the current. If the company cannot move forward, it will retreat.The one who holds the same view as Guo Taiming is his fellow countryman and predecessor - the late Wang Yongqing, chairman of Formosa Plastics Group. motto, and demonstrated its art of management during the first and second oil crises.

Today, the cases standing opposite Wang Yongqing and Guo Taiming are Jack Ma and Kazuo Wada. The former experienced an adventurous globalization strategy in the early days of his business, but he woke up in 2000 and "returned to China" again, which gave birth to Alibaba. Enviable high-speed growth; and Kazuo Wada used the bankruptcy of his Brazilian branch to prove that a company cannot pursue high-speed development too much. Guo Taiming, Wang Yongqing, Ma Yun, and Kazuo Wada’s opposing ideas can only explain one problem: different situations in which companies deal with crises will also be different, and there will never be a one-size-fits-all approach to solving crises.But it is important to address these difficulties rather than allow failure to continue.Liu Chuanzhi will agree with this judgment, he said: "Everyone is faced with the possibility of failure and setbacks, which is part of each of us's life experience, we must stick to our goals and not waver under any circumstances. "

Among the entrepreneurs recorded in this book, one (Wang Yongqing) has just passed away, and the youngest (Ding Lei) is only 38 years old. Their age spans three long centuries. They are in different industries. Some of the IT industry is hidden in the traditional manufacturing industry, and they also leave their traces in various industries such as chemicals, clothing, food, and real estate.These gaps and differences destined this group of people to fall into completely different predicaments. In the turbulent 20th century, there were two world wars and three oil crises; America, Asia, and Europe experienced Great Depression at different times, and natural disasters, stock market crashes, and epidemics appeared from time to time, all of which were like ghosts lurking Behind the economic prosperity, the lives of many enterprises were suddenly taken away. For entrepreneurs who are ready to accept the crisis all the time, when encountering an economic crisis, the first thing they think of is to save costs and cut expenses. Layoffs have become the most commonly used means, but this is a "dual strategy" worth weighing. Bladed Sword". In 1981, Jack Welch, who had just become the CEO of General Electric, went to inspect the nuclear department of General Electric. After discovering that the organization was bloated, Welch raised the big knife of layoffs. In just five years, he let the original 2410 The number of nuclear divisions reduced to 160 employees, and Welch later used it as a benchmark to drive 118,000 people out of GE.Although General Electric became one of the most profitable companies in the United States after layoffs, Jack Welch was named "America's Toughest Boss" by Fortune magazine and was nicknamed "Neutron Jack". The opposite of General Electric is Konosuke Matsushita. One day in 1930, Matsushita was sick in bed. The person in charge of taking care of the factory told him that the company had been hit hard by the financial run, and there was a large backlog of products. Half of the staff had to be laid off to survive the crisis.Panasonic, who heard the news, recovered miraculously. He made the most important decision for Panasonic: no layoffs, no salary cuts, let employees establish the concept of "taking the factory as home", and mobilize all employees to participate in sales .It was this decision that enabled Matsushita to grow against the trend in the crisis, and made Matsushita Electric Co., Ltd., which later dominated the electrical industry for a while, in one fell swoop. Also on the issue of layoffs, Jack Welch and Konosuke Matsushita went to opposite poles. Although both companies have also achieved great success, Panasonic has won a reputation for "no layoffs and no salary cuts", while General Electric has Bearing the notoriety of "profit machine".What needs to be pointed out in particular is that General Electric was not in a huge crisis when it laid off employees. If we put it into Panasonic's situation at that time, it is still unknown whether we can see General Electric today. It can be seen that the "belief" of an entrepreneur and his attitude towards the survival of the company determine what kind of attitude a company will face the public.This is like the face problem that the Chinese often say.This book is not intended to draw conclusions for enterprises, what we want to do is to provide a reference for the means of survival.If a crisis strikes, there will always be a backlog of products, declining profits, inability to make ends meet, and floating people. However, companies are always profit machines, so a broken chain of funds will often become the last straw that overwhelms the company. In this book, Kazuo Wada is a special case. He is the only representative who stands in the ranks of losers, but his moving point is that he stands up again after failure and starts his journey again at the age of 77.In 2001, as the former president of Yaohan in Japan, he published his autobiography called "Phoenix". In the book, Kazuo Wada, who was 72 years old at the time, sighed because the Yaohan company he founded four years ago went bankrupt. .And he sighed because he had a chance to revive the company, because Yaohan, which was in a financial crisis at the time, obtained 32 billion yen in cash through the sale of assets. As a result, Kazuo Wada made a fatal mistake. The precious cash was first used to repay bank debts instead of running the company, which plunged Yaohan, which he founded himself, into the abyss.After paying such a heavy price, Kazuo Wada understood the significance of funds for coping with corporate crises. Kazuo Wada entered the team of losers, but his experience has benefited latecomers endlessly. In 2003, "SARS" hit China, and New Oriental School, which was booming, had to stop its progress. Students no longer attended classes, teachers had to live, and the company had to operate as usual. It caused many companies to die silently, but New Oriental finally survived those years. The reason for its survival is that the head of the company, Yu Minhong, has always asked New Oriental to set aside a reserve fund of 200 million yuan, which finally saved New Oriental.The same example has repeatedly appeared in Intel, Hutchison Whampoa and Alibaba. When Intel encountered a product quality crisis in the 1980s, it was its abundant cash reserves that saved it; Li Ka-shing has always required the company's debt ratio to be lower than 12%. ; and when the financial turmoil came in 2008, Alibaba was able to shout slogans and recruit aggressively because of the large sum of money it received when it went public in 2007. Today, Wang Shi, an entrepreneur who climbed to the top of Mount Everest, and Jack Ma, who is known as the "man from Mars", have already stood at the pinnacle of Chinese entrepreneurs. They are the souls of their respective companies, and they are also the idols of many young people.But as Ma Yun himself said: "Today is cruel, tomorrow is even crueler, and the day after tomorrow is beautiful. But the vast majority of people will die tomorrow night, and only true heroes can see the sun of the day after tomorrow." This book records 20 The crisis moments of Chinese and foreign entrepreneurs running enterprises, and showing their own thoughts at "critical moments", the most important thing is to help everyone find the confidence to deal with the crisis. The protagonists in this book are not on the same starting line. They have different survival times, different scales, different industry positions, different operating models, different natures of enterprises, and different crises encountered. Angle to dissect these cases.However, there is a common theme revealed in all these stories, and that is faith. In 1963, 45-year-old Mary Kay Ash had just lost her first husband. A month after burying her husband, she started her dream journey in a small shop in Dallas, which she named after herself. A cosmetics company, and the reason for doing so is that she has always believed that all American women will always want to be more beautiful.In the subsequent development, Mary Kay has experienced ups and downs several times, but it has always stood firm as if it was blessed by a patron saint.Later, Mary Kay revealed the source of her "faith" in her autobiography: when she was still a child, her mother encouraged her to believe that "you can do it" when she was going to the unknown.In fact, this is an almost blind confidence, and the only explanation can only be that the "sixth sense" gave her strength. The same belief that gave Mary Kay Ash strength has also given strength to others in other moments, just as there is always someone struggling to find that ray of light in the dark. In 1985, Jobs was expelled from Apple, the company he founded, which was the greatest humiliation for the founder of a company.But even in such an extreme environment, Jobs still firmly believed that he could return to Apple, and he got his wish eight years later.In the Internet world, neither Wang Zhidong who was expelled by Sina nor Yang Zhiyuan who was expelled by Yahoo failed to do what Jobs did, but no one can explain the difference between them.It is inconceivable that the situation of different people facing the same crisis can be so different.But we all know that there are thousands of reasons for failure, but there is often only one reason for success. One thing is for sure, though: Neither the Mary Kays nor the Jobs expected their own success when they made those decisions.But, as an old saying goes: one step, one step, and you really get where you want to go.The way to survive in a crisis may be to say to yourself: "I can". In this regard, Mary Kay and Jobs undoubtedly set a benchmark for many entrepreneurs.